Asus Expands ROG Collection at Computex

Everything but the kitchen sink

Asus didn't make the trip to Computex unprepared, that's for sure. Instead, Asus unloaded a rather large collection of Republic of Gamer (ROG) products, including a new mouse, keyboard, a couple of new motherboards, monitor, gaming laptop, and several other items. There's even a console-like gaming PC in the mix -- it's not a Steam Machine, though it's ready to take residence in your living room or dorm.

Comments

Some of these things are really cool. It's hard to get the proper scale of a few of these items from the press-release image. There were no additional images on the site that was linked.

What's with the dust-trapping plastic shrouds on some of the motherboards these days? I don't care for it, kind of makes the product seem cheap. It might make sense if there were some super-awesome programmable electroluminescent strips, then window show-offs might want them. If the plastic shroud lit up like in Tron some people might be able to further justify the $300-$400 price tags some of these motherboards are commanding.

Those plastic covers are heat shrouds so that all the heat from your CPU and GPU don't get absorbed by the black PCB (in theory, never actually done any conclusive experiments with this). And I think they are actually metal, not plastic. But who really knows, those pictures are terrible quality.

It's more or less supposed to create a better air channel, basically smoothing out the rough surface of the PCB. But my conjecture is that it doesn't matter: if a part needs active cooling, it's going to have a fan, and it's going to suck in any air it can get regardless of what's going around it.

Heat from the GPU and CPU are going to dissipate into the motherboard anyway via ground plane and interconnects.

Seeing how it provides virtually no benefit, this is the reason why I tell everyone to avoid their Sabertooth boards (the ones with shrouds anyway) like the plague, because this is their main gimmick.

It's hard to tell with those horrible pictures if that material is matte-painted metal or plastic. I think my sentiment stands either way. I know the cooling section around the processor on that motherboard is a water block, but even that appears to be covered in something.

I never had any doubt a cover can prevent 'some' ambient heat radiating from the graphics card(s) to the motherboard. However after 9 months of normal use with case fans running, the areas under this cover become an insulated home for dust bunnies, a nice gray blanket of lint, dead skin and hair. Due to the design that dust blanket will be highly impervious to compressed air cans.

They need some standard photo shoots of their products, this press release stuff is garbage. Maybe MPC will get their hands on some of these things soon.